A Little Folly (18 page)

‘He does not mean it, you know,’ Louisa said, with laughing pain.

‘Your brother is almost as dear to me as – well, almost anyone,’ said Mr Tresilian, urging her on towards Hill Street. ‘Which is fortunate, as if I did not love him so well I could shake him. Well, there it is. I do not think I shall be invited to the faro-house again: which is no great distress to me.’

Louisa was already resolving inwardly that she must speak to Valentine herself; but his last words woke an alarm in her. ‘Mr Tresilian, you will not quite give up on Valentine, will you?’

‘Why, do you suppose he will not manage without my wise old saws?’ he said, with a penetrating look. ‘But, no, assuredly I will not. Though I cannot prevent him giving up on
me
.’

‘That will not happen,’ she said: she was determined that it would not; her own influence with Valentine must be exerted to prevent it. ‘And thank you for telling me. Though I have not been easy in talking about him behind his back.’

‘Nonsense. If that were the rule, there would never be any conversation at all.’

They were turning into Hill Street. Something he had said struck her, even through the cloud of her present perturbation. ‘Mr Tresilian, when my father used to say those things to you: did you truly not mind?’

He studied the distance again, this time rather as if the swell on the sea had subsided to a surprising calm. ‘I was always thinking of something else,’ he said.

He would not come in; and in a moment she had reason to be grateful for that. – Valentine, most rarely for him, was home, so she could approach him alone.

No amount of discretion or care could render this easy; and the task was harder in that she did not wish to make Mr Tresilian appear a tattle-tale. – But she had forgotten the intuitive understanding that had always joined her to her brother – perhaps because it had been less in evidence of late; she had barely begun to speak before he laid down his newspaper and reached out for her hand.

‘You are going to read me a lecture. You have been talking to Tresilian. – No, no, I am not angry in the least; and I do not mean that about a lecture, because that’s not in your nature. Or his, Lord bless him. But you are troubled. Come. Tell me where the trouble lies.’

‘It lies perhaps in my remaining a cautious country sort of creature after all. I did not suppose you went out a-nights to Bible-readings; and Tom gambles, I know, because I have heard him talk about it – at least, something about his cursed luck with the bones, which I presume are dice, unless there is a much more sinister side to Tom than we ever guessed. – But, Valentine, gaming for high stakes alarms me.’

‘So it would me, if I were differently situated, or if the stakes were really high, or if I were one of those unfortunates who simply cannot leave off. But I have, thank heaven, an ample independence; and as for what I have lost at the faro-table, it is nothing to what many young men lay out on fancy high-perch curricles and bloodstock. Or look at Tom’s tailor-bills: I like to be well dressed, but a
few
good coats are enough. Sometimes, besides, I win: not so often as I lose, I know that, for that is the nature of gaming – but I make it up here and there. In novels and plays, I know, young men are always ruining themselves at the tables; but in real life one must be spectacularly foolish to do any such thing. – Truly, you must not be uneasy about it. Tresilian may be: but as he will be the first to admit, he does not like town or its ways, and as soon as he and Kate have had their fill of sights, they will happily quit it.’

‘I shall try not to be uneasy,’ she said, studying him: despite the hot weather, which had turned Mr Tresilian sailor-brown, his complexion wore the paleness of a man who lived by candlelight. No less handsome, however; and Kate was not the only young woman she had seen casting aching glances in his direction, though all were received with the same indifference. ‘And perhaps if you, in the same spirit, were to try not to make me uneasy: if, now and then, you were to ask yourself, Would this make my country-cautious sister uneasy?, then—’

‘I know what it is,’ he said, smiling. ‘I think neither you nor Tresilian would be quite so concerned if it were any other faro-bank than Lady Harriet’s.’

‘I have a good deal of affection for Lady Harriet, and I am sorry for her situation. But one cannot deny it is a difficult – a delicate situation. Valentine, I heard about Colonel Eversholt.’

His smile remained, but his cheekbones seemed to grow sharper. ‘Tresilian is becoming a regular old gossip. Well, I dare say the morsel was too juicy to be resisted. Colonel Eversholt is, as I hope Tresilian conveyed to you, the most abominable man. If it were only violence and bluster – but there is manipulation too. I understood Lady Harriet a good deal better, simply from that one encounter. A last encounter, I hope.’

‘Apparently she did promise to meet him.’

‘Aye, so she did. It was undertaken to save her guests from more discomfort; but I know, from what she has told me, that her heart is now quite closed against him, beyond the possibility of reconciliation.’

‘Yet they cannot remain otherwise than married,’ she said gently and distinctly. ‘I do not know much about these things, but surely divorce is only to be obtained by the very highest and wealthiest, and only then with the greatest trouble and injury to reputation. And even a formal separation does not free her—’

‘My dear Louisa, you sound like a lawyer. Yes, no doubt these things are true; but they have very little to do with the natural feelings of the human heart. And it is those I am concerned with. Anything I can do to spare, to sweeten and to soothe those feelings in Lady Harriet, I will do. But you need not fear me in any danger. I have moved in the world a little, you know: I am no greenhorn. I am aware that the pleasure I take in Lady Harriet’s society, is one that malicious tongues would convert to a baser meaning. Let them: it would be beyond their understanding in any case. This will sound monstrous egotistical, but she reminds me of myself.’

‘I see there is a resemblance; but I do not think you could carry off bare shoulders as she does.’

‘You laugh, but I know you are still uneasy. The fact is, though she is obliged to maintain herself in a fashion that propriety deplores, and though her name is a dubious one to the Pearce Lynleys of the world, she is rather innocent than otherwise. She was long a dreamer, gazing at the world through the glass of wistful imagination: wishing to find a place in it, yet half doubting that it could ever be hers. The early influence that accustomed her to being lonely and disregarded was shaken off, perhaps, when she ran away to be married to that man – yet I don’t know: I fancy it was only a sort of interruption, and inside she is still the same open, trusting creature whose neglect made such a rash choice almost inevitable. She is simply bewildered at what her life has become. I know what it is like to inhabit dreams – as you surely do; and we who have woken to a brighter, better reality at last may surely have a heart to feel for her, who stepped out into the broad sunlit prospects, only to find them turned into dark passages that lead nowhere.’

This was spoken with such a combination of warmth and delicacy – was so revealing of everything that was honourable, just and sympathetic in her brother’s nature – that Louisa could not in conscience press him further without seeming to set a low value on those very qualities which, above all, she loved and esteemed in him. Some disquiet remained, especially from the glitter in his eyes when he mentioned Colonel Eversholt; but all had been said that
could
be said; and any disposition in her to renew the subject was lost in the surprise that greeted his next words.

‘And after all, Miss Country-caution, what of you and Francis Lynley?’ He grinned at her look. ‘There, I have caught you. No, no, I mean nothing of reproach, unless you were to find it in the fact that people are
talking
. And when do they ever do anything else? For my part I know little of him, but he seems well-bred enough, and notably human next to his brother. I surmise that to be a younger brother to Pearce Lynley must be a trial to any character, and the wonder is that he has not turned out a thorough scapegrace.’

‘Lieutenant Lynley is no sort of scapegrace,’ Louisa said promptly, ‘and he would be very ready to prove it, if he were ever to be accorded any measure of trust or confidence.’

‘You are partial,’ Valentine said, smiling. ‘No, no, I don’t mind it in the least. We are partial creatures, you and I, Louisa; and I for one am glad of it. To be sure, the more you incline to
him
, the more you put Pearce Lynley’s nose out of joint – but I do not suspect the operation of any such feeling.’

‘Valentine, I do not incline to Lieutenant Lynley. – That is, I find much that is interesting in him, alongside much that is difficult and perplexing; though that is hardly to be wondered at, given his situation. But that is all: my heart is entirely secure, thank you; and as for my feeling for Pearce Lynley, I simply have none of any kind – none.’

All this was spoken with the greatest calmness: – yet Louisa discovered such a confusion of emotion within her that she was even glad to have their colloquy ended by the arrival home of Mrs Spedding, accompanied by her friend Mrs Murrow: who saluted them in typical fashion by remarking that they both looked as if they were sickening for something, and she only hoped she wouldn’t catch it.

While Valentine applied himself to the stony task of conversing with the visitor, Louisa tried to tell herself that she had done her best with him; but she could not escape a feeling that, rather than persuading, she had been persuaded.

L
ouisa’s anxieties about Valentine’s association with Lady Harriet and her faro-house were far from allayed by his tender assurances. The sensation remained of a strange distance between them, across which she gestured in vain; neither could she find perfect repose in Mr Tresilian’s renewed undertaking to watch over him. Instead she found herself relying on the unsteady, even feverish comfort of distraction – which in London, this exceptional summer, was plentiful. The celebrations were coming to a head, with fireworks, regattas and military reviews among the public spectacles; and having made a large acquaintance in a society turned frenziedly sociable, Louisa found never a day, or part of a day, without its engagements.

In all this novelty and enjoyment, however, a keynote was struck, without which it would have been merely diverting noise. – Francis Lynley was the one she sought out, whenever they were mutually engaged. In his company and conversation she found an attraction that was not merely incidental: that could not be interrupted or discontinued without an itching wish to have it resumed; eagerly she looked out for him in the evening crush, or listened for his halting footstep on the stair in the mornings at Hill Street. There was everything in his temper and situation to engage her sympathies – she would not say her affections; and to Sophie’s repeated teasings about her being
in love
she could present only a tolerant smile.

Her acquaintance with Francis Lynley was, besides, as frustrating as it was pleasing. Where he could be easy and vivacious, he could likewise be withdrawn and bitter; and in the latter mood, was not above saying that she would presently grow tired of vexing his brother by being attentive to him, and would then drop him.

‘This is to paint me a very superficial creature,’ she answered, with real mortification.

‘Is it? Then I have paid you a compliment. To be superficial is the best thing in the world, surely. The superficial are always certain of endearing themselves wherever they go: no one is much inclined to worry about depths and, indeed, would rather prefer that you do not show any; and then the superficial are not likely to suffer great trouble or injury, for nothing goes very hard with them. No, no, shallowness is the thing: I would recommend it to everybody; if I ever had a child, I would urge its tutors – “Surface, please, cultivate the surface!”’

‘But surely where there are no depths, there are also no heights.’

He laughed crossly. ‘You reproach me very properly for my ill-humour by giving my nonsense serious attention, instead of walking away and talking to someone with a modicum of politeness.’

‘If it were only nonsense, I should not mind,’ said Louisa, still serious. ‘But I cannot be easy if I have given even the faintest impression that I am using you as a – as a weapon against your brother. Between him and me there is, I hope, a perfect understanding that my father’s hopes were founded on his own inclination, not mine: that is done with; and I should hate to think I have been coquetting over it.’ She hated the thought so much, indeed, that she banished it quickly from her mind; and was glad when Lieutenant Lynley made one of his sudden leaps into animation.

‘Now you have found me out exactly. It is just like when I used to beat my nurse’s leg with a stick – oh, I assuredly did, that was the species of little beast I was as a boy – and tell her she was in a very bad temper today: meaning, of course, that I was. I talk of your vexing Pearce, because that is what
I
am doing lately. I cannot help myself.’ He spread out his arms in wry appeal. ‘It would be better if he were more overbearing; but damn it, there is a new kind of patience in his taking me in hand, which quite discomfits me. Some influence must be at work, to make him like this – capable of showing a little more feeling than a marble grate: a very little, at any rate. Perhaps I am merely coming in for the best of him.’ He lowered his voice and drew closer, and she observed how very dark his eyes were – almost no distinction between iris and pupil. ‘There was a great to-do yesterday, with Mary Bowen wanting to give her notice. Whether he had found fault with her once too often, I don’t know: she is quite a downright creature; but somehow he persuaded her to reconsider, probably calculating that he would never find someone so well able to manage Georgiana, and that it was worth a little sacrifice of pride to keep her. Ah, what an amiable picture of our domestic life I am giving!’

Louisa could not help wondering whether that influence of which he spoke was Pearce Lynley’s continuing attachment to her. Certainly she was conscious of his addressing her with a persistent amiability, though it plainly cost him some exertion, and there was never any peril of his relaxing into pleasantness; and she could not but feel that if he was seeking to compete with Francis, even in a general way, he was presenting only a sort of varnish, which was very bland compared with the restless play of mind, the volatile spirits of his brother. But she was, as Valentine said, partial: – just how partial was revealed in her own surprise that Mr Tresilian did not much care for Lieutenant Lynley.

They met at Hill Street and elsewhere, and conversed with an apparent good understanding; but Mr Tresilian, when pressed, only said: ‘Oh, he is well enough. In truth I almost prefer his brother, stiff-neck though he is. At least you know where you are with him.’

Louisa was used to relying on the independence of Mr Tresilian’s judgement; and she was dismayed to suppose that he had fallen into a lazily conventional way of thinking, and had accepted the received idea of Francis Lynley as the troublesome and unreliable younger brother, who had planted those sad grooves between Mr Lynley’s brows.

‘Lieutenant Lynley, you know, has been much maligned,’ she told him.

‘Has he? I don’t hear of it. He has an honourable wound from the Peninsula, and is respected for it; he is received in good society: everyone speaks well of him, and the ladies positively quiver when he is by.’

She felt a little scornful at the notion of the quivering ladies – certainly at her being numbered amongst them. ‘It is a good opinion that has been hard earned; and I think he would willingly exchange it all to have his brother for once approve him, and allow that the indiscretions of the past may be outlived.’

‘Oh, as to that, he is a grown man,’ Mr Tresilian said, with a shrug, ‘and grown men should grow up.’

It was like Mr Tresilian to be blunt – but not to be unfeeling. Louisa could only account for it, after some reflection, by a speculation that he was jealous. Francis Lynley had after all lived in a daring and precarious fashion; whereas James Tresilian, after the brief adventure of his marriage, seemed to have contracted an aversion to the slightest risk. He was often muttering about the extravagant speculations going on in the funds now that Bonaparte was gone, and prophesying bubbles bursting; and though she was willing to believe he might be right, it seemed to her a pity that he should also be such a cautious investor in experience, content with small returns of pleasure, and an annuity of inexcitement.

Such was the state of her feeling when the Spedding household received an invitation to a ball at the Portman Square residence of Miss Astbury: a ball of exceptional magnificence, as she learned from Mrs Murrow, for several of the visiting notables from the Continent were positively engaged for. – Even the Golden Miss Astbury could not manage a tsar, but at least one German princeling and a general would lend their august presence to the evening, and make themselves available to be stared at.

‘Not that I can understand why all these foreigners are here,’ mourned Mrs Murrow.

‘Well, my dear, they are our allies, so we are celebrating defeating that dreadful Boney,’ said Mrs Spedding, brightly.

‘Why, what do we want to do that for?’

‘It is the custom to celebrate victories, ma’am,’ Louisa put in. ‘Somehow celebrating defeats does not carry the same enjoyment.’

Mrs Murrow shook her head. ‘I don’t know: I never heard the like of it. We never had such things when I was young. They had much better go home. The next thing you know, we shall have Red Indians here; and if I were to see a Red Indian walking down the street towards me, I hardly know what I should do, I am sure: I think I should fall down dead on the spot.’

The picture thus called up was as agreeable as it was unlikely; but not even Mrs Murrow’s fatuity could detract from the prospective pleasure of such an occasion. The Lynleys were invited, as Louisa soon discovered from Francis when he called – Pearce remaining quite a favourite, as he drily remarked, with the glacial Miss Astbury; and the Tresilians too, Mrs Spedding’s good nature having secured them an introduction at Portman Square – though Louisa suspected Sophie had been the chief instigator.

‘I mean to make him dance with me, as we did at Pennacombe,’ she confided to Louisa. ‘Then we shall see something.’

Louisa did not believe they would see anything – or, rather, did not wish to believe it. The thought of Mr Tresilian being caught in Sophie’s gossamer web still disturbed her more than she could account for: – he was after all, to use his own words, a grown man. But she suspected that in many regards grown men, and women, did not grow up – that the fresh susceptibility of youth still sent its green shoots through the hard stones of experience. But she felt herself powerless, and contradictory: who was she to take Mr Tresilian aside, and warn him against such an entanglement? And was she not the same woman who was deploring his excessive habit of caution?

She could only trust that something would save him: – his own good sense: some apprehension of wrong paths, and right paths – something.

When the evening of the Portman Square ball arrived, sultry and airless, she experienced an intense relief and pleasure in being seated next to Valentine in the Spedding carriage. Here also she found grounds for hope that a right judgement would prevail. Instead of devoting the evening to his usual pursuits – which, though he gave nothing away, she took to be his continued, fascinated attendance on Lady Harriet – he had yielded to her careful persuasions: which were based on the simple truth that she would enjoy herself much more if he were there. This, indeed, was much nearer to what she had fancied when they had begun their enterprise of living; and on arriving at the house in Portman Square, which was brightly lit in every window, bedecked with flags and banners, and besieged by carriages, she felt that very little was wanting for her complete felicity, at least for the evening, which was as far as she cared to look. That want was quickly supplied: a glance across the great reception-room assured her that Francis Lynley was there, and they were soon joined by the Tresilians, in good spirits – Kate especially. She wore a new white gown that spoke as eloquently for her taste as her neatness of figure; but as ever it was the animation of amusement that brought her beauty to the surface. Among the guests was a German noble, to whom Lady Carr had introduced her, and who bore the redoubtable name of Count Pfaffenhoffen.

‘I could keep my countenance a little more if he were not so grave and solemn,’ Kate said. ‘A Pfaffenhoffen ought at least to be a little jolly. – But it is very childish of me: I’m sure the name Tresilian sounds just as absurd to him.’

‘A mercy Mrs Murrow did not have to make the introduction,’ Valentine said. ‘She would never have recovered from it.’

‘The German language does have its beauties,’ Kate went on, ‘but I fear it often sounds abrupt to our ears. That lovely name Cinderella, which is very pretty in French and Italian, as Cendrillon and Cenerentola, comes out in German as Aschenputtel.’

‘Enough to make the prince repent of his choice.’ Valentine laughed. ‘But I had no idea you knew German, Miss Tresilian.’

‘Oh, studying music you pick it up almost unawares,’ Kate said, making a creditable attempt not to blush.

‘It is not my place perhaps to remark on the subject,’ intoned Miss Rose, who had responded to the brilliancy of the occasion by wearing a large cameo of someone long dead, ‘but it was always my poor understanding that the moral of the fable consisted in the prince disregarding the superficial, and valuing those qualities in the heroine that had been overlooked. I may be wrong: I am sure I am.’

‘I knew a fellow at Oxford who had the most ridiculous name,’ said Tom, beginning his great rumble of laughter. ‘One simply could not hear it without laughing out loud – it was so uncommonly odd. What was it now? Well, I cannot for the life of me remember it, but I can assure you it was the funniest thing.’

‘Your assurance of the fact is all I need, Mr Spedding,’ said Mr Tresilian. ‘My sides are fairly splitting already.’

The rooms were very soon even more crowded than on Louisa’s first visit there; but what had been irritating was now stimulating. She was known: no longer conscious of herself as an awkward outsider: eager to drink in faces and talk, to mark the impressive and be amused by the absurd; and if she found a part of her pleasure in being admired, whisperingly commended, and sought after, she hoped that made her human rather than sinfully vain.

Before the dancing began, she made her way over to Lieutenant Lynley, aware that his lameness would render him unable to participate in it. – She did not mind for herself, but she minded for him. At the first sound of the music, however, he only glanced up, and said: ‘Ah, now comes my salvation. I shall have the great pleasure of not having the pleasure. Oh, if you like I could make a great Byronish fuss about it, and look stricken and doomed and outcast, because I am shut out for ever from a quadrille. I have even thought of lumbering about the floor in spite of my recalcitrant foot, and disrupting the set unconscionably: – that might be amusing. But the unromantic truth is I never cared excessively for dancing. It is rather as if you were to be told you could never again drink lemonade in your life: you would have to work hard to fancy it a deprivation.’

It was spoken in his most rapid and careless way: still Louisa suspected, once the dancing began, that the exclusion would be felt; and she would willingly have stayed by his side for the first set, if it had not occurred to her that this would be precisely calling attention to it. She saw across the room that his brother had long been in conversation with Miss Astbury, and was now offering his hand: Miss Astbury very civilly declined, however – the German princeling was hovering, and on such an occasion precedence must be observed; even though he was a painfully young man with large ears, and such a chestful of medals that he must have begun winning them in his cradle. The next thing she knew, Pearce Lynley was before her, inviting her to dance, and she was accepting. – She hardly knew why: it was part perhaps of a general disposition to be pleased, reinforced by the happy sight of Valentine leading out Kate Tresilian. That Mr Tresilian was partnering Sophie was less surprising, as Sophie had earlier been inviting the invitation by fondly hanging on Miss Rose’s arm, to that lady’s stony astonishment, and sighing that with one or two exceptions the place was full of young puppies and nobodies whom she would rather die than dance with.